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Saturday, 1 December 2012

It's on a day like today, when the events of the past 22 months point to
an incredibly unsettling truth, that any good will you had toward the
United States of America fades away.

Yes, black people in Memphis, Tennessee believe they built this pyramid too

Completely.

It's on a day like today that you look at a document, the US
Constitution - revered by so many for reasons not so discernible anymore
- and realize we now live under a tyranny far worse then any King
George III could ever have created.

Suburban Shelby County residents had been preparing for swearing-in
ceremonies for the municipal school board members they elected Nov. 6,
but late Tuesday officials from Arlington, Bartlett, Collierville,
Germantown, Lakeland and Millington had dropped those plans and were
reassessing their options.

After months of challenges, court
proceedings and three days of mediation last week failed to reach an
accord between the outlying cities and county commission, city council
and city of Memphis over municipal schools, U.S. Dist. Judge Samuel
"Hardy" Mays ruled legislation allowing the suburbs to pursue municipal
schools this year is unconstitutional.

Mays' ruling means that,
for now, the suburbs' plans for starting their school systems in August
2013 are on hold. That includes August referendums where suburban voters
overwhelmingly approved establishing the systems, and the Nov. 6
elections of school boards in each of the respective suburbs.

A bold bid by the struggling, majority-black Memphis City Schools
system to force a merger with the majority-white, successful suburban
district has fanned relatively routine fears over funding and student
performance into accusations of full-blown racism.

The fight over
the fate of 150,000 public school students has stirred long-festering
emotions in Memphis and surrounding Shelby County, creating a drama that
has spread beyond school board meetings to union rallies, the state
Legislature and federal court.The spark for the schools consolidation fight began smoldering on
Election Day last November, when Republicans took control of the state
Legislature and saw Republican Bill Haslam win the governor’s race.
Shelby County’s Republican politicians finally saw their chance to
forever block a merger by securing special school district status.

The special status would draw a boundary around the Shelby County
school district, protecting its autonomy and tax base – and, according
to Jones, taking $100 million a year from the already underfunded
Memphis schools system.

“We’re already a divided community in terms of racial polarization,”
said Tom Word, who is white and a parent of three children in Memphis
public schools. “That would further exacerbate that division.”

Memphis school board member Martavius Jones launched the charter
surrender effort to get out in front of any effort by Shelby County to
fence off its schools from the city.Memphis schools began integrating in 1961 without the violence
other Southern cities endured. White parents instead left the city for
the suburbs or put their children in private schools, effectively
re-segregating education into a mostly black city system and a largely
white suburban system.The 2010-2011 budget for Memphis City Schools
is about $890 million to cover 103,000 students, 85 percent of whom are
black. For the 47,000-student Shelby County system, which is 38 percent
black, it’s more than $363 million.

When thousands of white students abandoned the Memphis schools 38
years ago rather than attend classes with blacks under a desegregation
plan fueled by busing, Joseph A. Clayton went with them. He quit his job
as a public school principal to head an all-white private school and
later won election to the board of the mostly white suburban district
next door.Now, as the overwhelmingly black Memphis school district is being
dissolved into the majority-white Shelby County schools, Mr. Clayton is
on the new combined 23-member school board overseeing the marriage. And
he warns that the pattern of white flight could repeat itself, with the
suburban towns trying to secede and start their own districts.

“There’s
the same element of fear,” said Mr. Clayton, 79. “In the 1970s, it was a
physical, personal fear. Today the fear is about the academic decline
of the Shelby schools.”

The
merger — a result of actions by the Memphis school board and City
Council, a March referendum and a federal court order — is the largest
school district consolidation in American history and poses huge
logistical challenges. Memphis teachers are unionized, Shelby County’s
are not; the county owns its yellow buses, the city relies on a
contractor; and the two districts use different textbooks and different
systems to evaluate teachers.

Toughest of all may be bridging the
chasms of race and class. Median family income in Memphis is $32,000 a
year, compared with the suburban average of $92,000; 85 percent of
students in Memphis are black, compared with 38 percent in Shelby
County.But Kenya Bradshaw, who was recently elected secretary of a separate
21-member commission set up to recommend policies for combining the new
districts, sees the merger as a chance for Memphis “to re-envision its
educational system.”

“I hope people can see that this is an
opportunity to reflect on our history and not make the same mistakes,”
said Ms. Bradshaw, an advocate for educational equity, who is black. “If
people are leaving for reasons that they don’t want their children to
be around children of color or children who are poor, then I say to
them, ‘I bid you farewell.’ ”Though race has become the elephant in the room, the process actually began last winter as a struggle over finances.

Shelby
County includes Memphis and six incorporated suburbs to its north and
east. Tax money from the entire county is distributed to the two
districts based on student population. Memphis, with 103,000 students,
compared with 47,000 in the county, gets more of the money, though the
suburbs contribute more per capita.

Fearing that suburban
politicians and Tennessee’s Republican-dominated legislature might alter
this arrangement to allow more tax money to stay in the suburbs,
Memphis voted in December to surrender the school charter. Multiple
lawsuits ensued, and a federal judge ruled on Sept. 28 that the two
districts would be governed by a unified board but would run separately
for two years, and then would combine in 2013.

Actually, the financial aspect of this story is about race too; why
should white taxpayers in the suburbs of Memphis have to financially
support the poor life decisions of black people and subsidize their
fatherless children in K-12 education? Why can't their tax dollars be
used to augment their children's education in the white suburban school
district?

The A&E police documentary that made TV stars of local homicide detectives appears to be DOA in Memphis.

Police
director Larry Godwin decided not to renew the department's deal with
the company that produces "The First 48" after several City Council
members voiced concerns that the show made the Bluff City look like
Murder Central.

"I heard out-of-town people say Memphis was out
of control," said City Council member Wanda Halbert. "We were exposing
the world to the worst aspects of our city."

Memphis has high rates of crime, poverty, blight, and misery and low
property values because of its high population of black people; the
suburbs of Memphis have high property values and low rates of crime,
poverty, and blight because of its high population of white people.

This story makes perfectly clear the role that white people, be they
from the greatest generation; retirees; baby-boomers; generation x;
generation y; millennial's; currently enrolled in K-12 private or public
schools; newborn; in the womb; or still in the reproductive organs of a
white mother or father and just a fun night or two away from being
conceived... play in 2012 America and all that they're good for:
providing the tax revenue so that it can be racially redistributed to
allow for the proliferation of non-whites.

If you dare protest -- then that revered document, the US Constitution,
will be applied as a vigorous reminder that white people have only two
choices: death and taxes.

It's on a day like today, when the events of the past 22 months point
to an incredibly unsettling truth, that any good will you had toward
the United States of America fades away.